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I intend to do a openbenchmarking.org blog posting of that one.. Can you email me matthew @ phoronix.com to discuss?

matthew why dont you and/or Michael write a openbenchmarking wrapper and use the generic checkasm --bench as supplied with a x264 git pull that use that wrapper to analyse the mass of real life data for the speed of each C and assembly routine you get there.

in fact in this case these cores being new, its a very effective way to get working AVX speed result's for a given core today as x264/checkasm include that in the latest git now, can you do that ASAP and make it a default run option and make a section on openbenchmarking for the raw checkasm --bench output at least

real life data from a current x264/checkasm git pull is far more interesting than any other app/benchmark as its the only one today that's got masses of fully tested assembly and is maintained and patched when bug's appear or new core's come on line.

and its a simple report and give temporary remote shell access to the core x264 assembly dev's if you cant git format patch/fix it yourself, they like feedback and especially checkasm --bench result's for new cores too.

Knuckles/thalin perhaps you two can also do a basic git pull of x264 compile and do a checkasm --bench and put them here/on a permanent http://pastebin.com link

I just found this out and have not seen it come up yet in discussion, C-ray measures floating point performance which is bulldozers weak point as it only has one FP unit per module. Integer performance then should be about double which would put it on par with sandy bridge.

No, Bulldozer has a flexable FPU. If C-ray is using 256 bit FP calculations then yes it appears as one FPU per two cores. But if it is using 128 bit FP's then each core has it's own FPU. Better yet if C-ray uses 64 bit FP's then each core has two FPU's.

For me personally, I am a big Folding@Home user. It can scale to 128 threads and only uses 64 bit floating point ops. Bulldozer will be amazing.

No, Bulldozer has a flexable FPU. If C-ray is using 256 bit FP calculations then yes it appears as one FPU per two cores. But if it is using 128 bit FP's then each core has it's own FPU. Better yet if C-ray uses 64 bit FP's then each core has two FPU's.

For me personally, I am a big Folding@Home user. It can scale to 128 threads and only uses 64 bit floating point ops. Bulldozer will be amazing.

Everything I've seen says this is wrong. Do you have a source?

Bulldozer is supposed to have 1 FP core per module, versus 2 integer cores. They say this allows them to make the FP core beefier than it would have been otherwise, because it's one of the more complicated (and therefore expensive) portions of the CPU.

It is supposed to emulate the 256 bit AVX instructions by transparently using 2 128 bit SSE registers at once, perhaps that's what confused you?

I meant how they are used logically not physically, in direct response to the other user saying there is only one FPU at all no matter what the type of instruction being used.

You are saying two different things here.

Originally Posted by smitty3268

Everything I've seen says this is wrong. Do you have a source?

Bulldozer is supposed to have 1 FP core per module, versus 2 integer cores. They say this allows them to make the FP core beefier than it would have been otherwise, because it's one of the more complicated (and therefore expensive) portions of the CPU.

It has two 128 bit FPU's per module and both can be independently used. The cost / die savings is by not including two 256 bit FPU's.

Originally Posted by smitty3268

It is supposed to emulate the 256 bit AVX instructions by transparently using 2 128 bit SSE registers at once, perhaps that's what confused you?

Exactly, but just above you said there is only one.

Now I could be wrong by saying thee are two separate 128 bit FPU's. But that would mean the BD architecture pictures we have seen are a logical view not a physical one. Otherwise I keep seeing two separate FPU's per module.

I just found this out and have not seen it come up yet in discussion, C-ray measures floating point performance which is bulldozers weak point as it only has one FP unit per module. Integer performance then should be about double which would put it on par with sandy bridge.

dont think so, the AMD has not beaten Intel at Integer performance clock for clock for a long time if ever, and that's not likely to change when your multi core x264 encoding etc.

Originally Posted by Jimbo

Its pretty interesting what AMD has done. Just forget about the number of cores!, they created the bulldozer module which contains 2 integer cores and 1 FP core. A CPU will contain various bulldozer modules.

This redesign is aimed to increase performance on generic programs, which uses lot of integer operations (games included). Programs which makes use of a lot of FP operations (math, video encoders...) would probably not get performance boost.

Indeed, it should be interesting to see more tests of this AMD CPU redesign.

nope , video encoders or rather the codecs both video and audio dont use Floating Point, they are all integer operations based as can be seen in x264 and ffmpeg etc...

like i said above , a simple git pull, compile, and checkasm --bench result will show this and no auto vectorisation compiler mess to contend, with as at least the assembly is hand coded and yasm macro based re-processing, an/or you could always add in the x264 timing code (i think Loren <pengvado> Merritt originally wrote) http://pastebin.com/YxNAaCGj

but unless someone runs the test in these bulldozer with their improved ram controllers , SSE4.2 and 256 bit AVX instructions (even though they may not be the 3 operand opcodes ?) to compare to Intel AVX etc than we shall never know for sure as real life data is required

No, Bulldozer has a flexable FPU. If C-ray is using 256 bit FP calculations then yes it appears as one FPU per two cores. But if it is using 128 bit FP's then each core has it's own FPU. Better yet if C-ray uses 64 bit FP's then each core has two FPU's.

For me personally, I am a big Folding@Home user. It can scale to 128 threads and only uses 64 bit floating point ops. Bulldozer will be amazing.

well if that's the case then surely a Nvidia and those new PANTHER POINT aka 22 nm processors ivy bridge LGA 1155/LGA 2011
with

are probably going to serve you better , i imagine there will be a Nvidia with PCI express 3.0 bus by then too OC.